I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to telecommunications, and more specifically to techniques for associating user equipment (UE) electronic identifiers with a user of the UE.
II. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content, such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. Wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks. A wireless communication network may also be referred to as a wide area network (WAN).
A wireless communication network may include a number of network communications hubs (also referred to as evolved node Bs, eNBs, or access nodes) that can support communication for a number of user equipments (UEs). In a WAN, communication by and between UEs typically occurs at the request of at least one of the UEs via uplink/downlink channels between the UEs and a network communications hub. A UE is thus enabled to communicate with a network communications hub. Also, if two UEs are in the vicinity of each other, they may be enabled to communicate directly, that is, without communicating through the network communications hub. A UE may thus be enabled to communicate peer-to-peer (P2P), also referred to as device-to-device (D2D), with one or more other UEs.
More particularly, often times in public environments (e.g., social events or gatherings), two people within a line of sight (or line of acknowledgement) of one another may wish to converse directly with one another, and doing so using P2P communication might prevent others in the environment from knowing the substance of the conversation. Further, despite being within visual range, the two people may not be close enough to one another to engage in the desired private conversation without using P2P communication. As such, communicating directly using P2P over the respective UEs of the people in the conversation is likely ideal in this scenario. However, in the known art, only if the two people already know one another, and if each device knows the identifier of the other, is the desired P2P communication likely to be available. That is, without any prior knowledge of the other person (i.e., without knowing any identification information, such as a phone number), the problem of establishing a private P2P conversation remains.
An approach to this problem has been to setup a local peer registry in which each person's UE may register its respective identifiers and monitor other neighboring UEs' identifiers. Such a local peer registry may either be realized by: 1) setting up a local broadcast radio channel for peer announcement and discovery; or 2) setting up a central location server to which UEs may report their respective global positioning system (GPS) coordinates and identifiers through a wireless WAN connection (whereby the proximity is determined according to their reported locations). However, particularly in the aforementioned social setting, it may be very difficult for a person (or user) to find a particular identifier of the other user with whom he or she is interested in conversing, such as due to the fact that there maybe many people using the local peer registry.
Accordingly, there is a need for a user to be able to associate a particular identifier of a UE with the user of the UE.